Wiki-Studio

Make movies through collaboration

Collaborative Innovation class Spring 2015

What it does

Wiki Studio is platform for collaboratively making videos. Nowadays, movies and videos are often made by a group of individuals. Independent of whether they’re doing it professionally or as an amateur, these groups do not have a convenient way of working together to build their videos. Wiki Studio helps to solve this very problem. Wiki Studio is a web-based application that allows users to upload clips and work together to build a larger video/film.

Presently, groups develop their own unique ‘hacks’ to make the video creation process simpler. These ‘hacks’ are not really sustainable answers to the problem at hand. They either involve the entire team always shooting the video together (which is impractical in today’s fast-moving and busy world), or people sending in their videos to a single person, who is the responsible for tying all the clips together. Wiki Studio allows groups to make videos over the internet and smoothly. Every member of the team can select the scene that they are uploading a clip for. They can go ahead and upload their respective clips. Wiki Studio will not only organize and store the uploaded clips, but will tie them up together to make an entire movie out of individual clips. Users can then watch these movies as well give feedback (through commenting) on them.

Therefore, Wiki Studio allows serious filmmaking teams to go about their business effectively, amateur filmmakers to showcase their talent by finding scripts/scenes to make videos for, and movie enthusiasts to find a ton of interesting entertainment.

How it works

We used Ruby on Rails (RoR) as our main web framework while building Wiki Studio. We created a script, scene, and clip models. These models were associated with each other Every script has many scenes, and every scene has many clips. By virtue of the those 2 associations, we can conclude that every script has many clips. We uploaded a default script. Our focus was to build an application that could allow users to upload clips for the different scenes of that script, and watch a single continuous film made by tying together the clips for the different scenes (the most recently uploaded uploaded clip for each scene). The user selects the scene for which he/she wants to upload a clip. Then, the user uploads the clip, which the application automatically associates with the selected scene. When a clip is added for a particular scene, our application also makes sure that the necessary changes are made, so that the video corresponding to the script (to which the scene belongs) as a whole is also updated. We use Javascript to systematically play the clips so that they look like a singular video, rather than different clips. Once the video begins play to play, we make sure that the Javascript code is able to tell that our present video is about to end soon, and appropriately requests for the next clip, before rendering it to be played.

Users can also add comments to entire videos that they watch (not just individual clips). The addition of these comments is handled by the comments controller, and the comment model. Our application is presently locally deployed, and uses the database and filesystem provided by Rails.

Technologies used

● Html

● Css

● Javascript

● Ruby on Rails

● Twitter Bootstrap 3

Next Steps

There is a wide variety of future developments that can take place on this platform. User can be allowed to make user profiles where they can share information about themselves, their interests etc. This will help add an element of personalization to the application. We can also make changes to the code such that users can individually ‘like’/‘dislike’ videos, and make movies based on the most ‘liked’ clips, rather than the most recent ones. Additionally, we can add features that will let users add new scripts to the database, and even edit existing videos. Letting users share videos/clips/scripts that they value and enjoy on social media is another interesting addition that can be made to Wiki Studio. Lastly, an ambitious addition that Wiki Studio can do with is a recommendation engine. Based on access to social media profiles and the ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ made by users, we can recommend videos to users videos that we think they will enjoy watching.